Well, well...

James K Smith jksmith at dx-machine.com
Wed Aug 1 20:54:47 PDT 2007


I've been blathering for about two years over in Delphi land that the next
big thing in computing was the internet as a platform in and of itself - the
OS is reduced to another backend, like a db server, whatever. The remote end
user will give a crap less what OS is hosting the app, as long as that app
meets expectations. To make the internet fully realized, two issues have to
be addressed:

1) Proof of correctness in code. The days of no real or implied liability
are coming to an end, because even trivial  applications become
mission-critical when they are service providers. Extensive use of unit
testing and contract programming show best effort on behalf of the
manufacturer, which an educated business community will eventually pay more
for.

2) True concurrency instead of just simplistic threads and cores. If a unit
of computing power is available somewhere, I want the option to be able to
use it for my app.

I've groaned for these features for quite a while for other languages, and
even dabbled in Eiffel for a bit, but I've never come across a language that
has developed so much critical mass for this specific functionality. And
like icing on the cake, I get array slices back, which I haven't enjoyed
using since my Stony Brook Modula-2 dos days. It's like somebody asked me
what I wanted to see in a language and libs without really asking me.

Kudos to Mr. Bright and all the developers working to grow the community.
And thanks to Code::Blocks actually working with D and ddbg out of the box,
I'm already coding.

James





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